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Bring practical education to your course with The Seventh Level Framework

Introduce your students to live case studies and influencer concepts on topics they care about. We worked directly with CatalystU and their co-founder, Amanda Slavin to put together our course materials on the Seventh Level Engagement Framework

Over the past six years HubSpot’s Education Partner Program has worked with over 2000 professors to make resources such as marketing software, CRM, and free online courses available to their students. We've seen firsthand how much professors care about the education they provide along with they can do and want to do when they have the resources to give their students a leg up.

With this project, we spoke to professors and took their feedback on how we can enhance our education resources. A few of the takeaways we had were:

  • Live Business Case Studies
  • Direct Software Applications
  • Influencer Concepts

The Brand Engagement projects allows your students to apply the concepts they are learning in class to a real world scenario, along with the opportunity to earn HubSpot Academy and CatalystCreativ certifications that will put them a step ahead of their peers.

Download all seven levels of the Brand Engagement project below

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Explore our Courses

We partnered with Amanda Slavin, Co-founder and CEO of CatalystU and author of The Seventh Level, to create this classroom resource that follows the framework that Amanda uses to help businesses like Coca-Cola, NPR, The Oakland Raiders, and Google better engage with their audiences.

In the sections below, find the complete course materials to teach brand engagement and The Seventh Level in the classroom. Each course focuses on a different level of engagement and involves different software tools to solve business case scenarios.

  1. EPP - BE Project Course Slides-2

    Level One: Breaking Through Disengagement with HubSpot Ads

    Lesson Overview:  In this first level of engagement, brands fight for an audience to acknowledge their messages. To get through this level, students need to fully understand who they are as a business to find the ideal buyer persona that will connect with them. Then, they’ll need to understand the buyer’s journey - what an audience member might be thinking, feeling, and doing when they receive messages from you.  With this as a foundation, you can create advertisements that effectively engage with your audience. 

    Flywheel Stage: Attract

    Level of Engagement: Disengagement

    HubSpot Tools Used: HubSpot Ads

    Get Started
  2. EPP - BE Project Course Slides (3)-1

    Level Two: Direct Website Traffic Using Pillar Content

    Lesson Overview: This course focuses on pillar content to create resources for visitors to your site. 

    In today’s digital environment, attention is finite. This means it’s important to give site visitors what they need - fast. Unsystematic engagement is the second level of engagement, when visitors are confused by your messaging and cannot continue with their task. Negate unsystematic engagement by collecting the resources on your site in a comprehensive way. For businesses with a longer buyer’s journey to educate customers, leveraging pillar content is key to getting past this low level of engagement.

    Flywheel Stage: Attract

    Level of Engagement: Unsystematic Engagement

    HubSpot Tools Used: Content Management System, Landing Pages

    Get Started
  3. EPP - BE Project Course Slides (2)-1

    Level Three: Use Contextual Messaging to Solve for Frustrated Engagement

    Lesson Overview: This course teaches you how to create smart calls to action on your website, using smart lists and CTAs in HubSpot software. Start by creating different groups based on the data that is available in Coachella’s CRM. Using this data, students will learn the logic behind lists and how to leverage them to create smart offers for visitors on their website. 

    Flywheel Stage: Attract

    Level of Engagement: Frustrated Engagement

    HubSpot Tools Used: HubSpot CRM, Smart Lists, Calls-to-Action

    Get started
  4. EPP - BE Project Course Slides (5)-1

    Level Four: Creating Structure Dependent Engagement With Your Instagram Audience

    Lesson Overview:For most brands, the majority of their followers fall to a structure-dependent level where they consume content but never reach higher levels of engagement. This course teaches students to create engaging content on Instagram and focuses on what a brand can do to nurture these followers with the content that they post. By getting followers to like or comment, brands can open up the opportunity to engage with audience members at higher levels, which will have visible business impacts. 

    Flywheel Stage: Engage

    Level of Engagement: Structure Dependent Engagement

    HubSpot Tools Used: HubSpot Social Tools, Instagram

    Get Started
  5. EPP - BE Project Course Slides (6)-1

    Level Five: Connecting a Brand Partnership With Your Audience’s Self-Identity Through Email Nurturing

    Lesson Overview: This course teaches how to create a smart email nurturing campaign to promote a brand partnership. Level five focuses on brand partnerships, based on an audience’s own self-regulated interest. In this stage, students will see the brand partnership as valuable as long as it connects with their audience.

    Flywheel Stage: Engage

    Level of Engagement: Self-regulated Interest

    HubSpot Tools Used: Marketing Automation, Marketing Email, HubSpot CRM

    Get Started
  6. EPP - BE Project Course Slides (7)-1

    Level Six: Developing Critical Engagement With Followers Using HubSpot’s Social Media Tools

    Lesson Overview:This course focuses on social media platforms to create a comprehensive social listening, engagement, and influencer campaign. Engaging with followers that are sharing their experiences with your brand involves an audience’s critical engagement, which is level six of the Seventh Level Engagement framework. This is when audience members are actively sharing your content not because they are prompted, but because you have inspired them to do so. This course teaches you to build your online community of followers and influencers. 

    Flywheel Stage: Delight

    Level of Engagement: Critical Engagement

    HubSpot Tools Used: HubSpot Social Tools

    Get Started
  1. EPP - BE Project Course Slides (8)-1

    Level Seven: Harnessing the Power of Brand Evangelists using the Seventh Level

    Lesson Overview: This course focuses on the fundamentals of creating a valuable loyalty program that connects with the seventh level of your audience. The seventh level is the highest level of engagement that you can have with a customer, where they feel directly aligned with the values of your company. By understanding the motivations of customers to engage in these programs, you can create loyalty programs that effectively drive your audience to become brand evangelists like this. 

    Flywheel Stage: Delight

    Level of Engagement: Literate Thinking

    HubSpot Tools Used: Marketing Automation, Emails, Landing Pages

    Get Started

Teaching with The Seventh Level

Watch the video below to learn more about The Seventh Level and these courses that we created with Amanda Slavin.

These courses are based on The Seventh Level, the debut book from Amanda Slavin, Co-founder and CEO of the brand consulting firm CatalystU, and the developer of The Seventh Level Engagement Framework. The book is the most comprehensive exploration of the framework to date. 

The framework demystifies engagement by breaking it into seven distinct levels, and providing users with tools, questions, and a methodology for evaluating and elevating their own audience engagement. The Seventh Level Engagement Framework is the secret sauce behind everything Slavin’s team does at CatalystU, the creative agency that she founded with the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh—this book is that recipe. 

Seventh Level Engagement- Full Levels

To effectively teach this course, you should first understand the framework. There are a couple of ways to get started; 

First, read The Seventh Level book. You can purchase/download your own copy here.

Second, leverage the resources available to you through HubSpot. In partnership with Slavin, HubSpot Academy has developed a free brand engagement course, which you can take here, as well as a 4 part blog series on the Framework, which you can read here.

In addition, within each of the lessons in this course, there are HubSpot Academy lessons to help teach additional concepts as well as links software tools that are needed to complete that lesson.

To learn more about The Seventh Level Engagement Framework and access additional free resources created by the CatalystCreativ team, visit their website.

Learn More About these Courses

Open the sections below to read about all the different parts of this education.

  • This is a series of free courses designed by educators , influencers, and HubSpot’s Education Partner Program to give educators the resources they need to teach Brand Engagement in today’s digital world. Every course is centered around real Brand Engagement problems that we see in businesses today, that are presented to students through case studies. These case studies challenge students to pinpoint problems affecting their business and provide solutions using HubSpot Marketing software.

    As they go through these cases, our online lessons and how-to content will provide them all of the support they need to build out real marketing campaigns to solve these business problems. These campaigns will include the full stack of HubSpot Digital Marketing tools so that students can develop Instagram stories, smart content, nurturing workflows, and much more.

    Our hope is that students taking these courses will learn how these tools work and encourage them to use software tools to come up with creative solutions to business problems when they graduate.

  • ES CXS 221 Email Banner v3These courses look at engagement in a different light by introducing Amanda Slavin’s Seventh Level Engagement Framework, which focuses on the individuals that make up your audience and the engagement they feel with your brand. Instead of thinking of engagement as binary, where someone is either engaged or disengaged, this framework suggests a nuanced way to strategically re-engage your audience through seven levels of engagement until they become evangelists of your business.

  • Business examples are helpful in these types of exercises because it gives students context into why they are completing an assignment. Instead of creating a hypothetical solution for a problem, they can find a creative solution to a real problem. We want to inspire students to approach problems in innovative ways, so we allow them to develop their own ideas to solve these business problems.

    The business cases in this course  focuses on asking students questions that encourage them to  evaluate a situation and the viewpoint of their audience as they approach a business challenge, so they can find the solution that solves for their specific customer. 

  • Marketing software tools are the things that help you structure and scale engagement with an audience. Tools like website chat, Instagram stories, smart content and Facebook Messenger present new channels that marketers are just beginning to use. The next generation of marketers will mold what the future of these tools looks like. We need to show them these tools so they know what they have to work with and to  help them think critically and creatively.

    Every professor in HubSpot’s free Education Partner Program is given a free package of the HubSpot Marketing Professional tools so that their students can learn by doing.

  • We use assignments based on these case scenarios to present students with some ways we might use marketing tools to solve business problems, such as using the new Instagram close friends feature to incentivize Coachella attendees. Students taking these courses brainstorm and build these solutions on their own. By showing students how to use these tools, we aim to inspire them to come up with creative solutions on their own.

Professor Testimonials

  1. Randy Harrison - Emerson College

    Randy Harrison, Emerson College

    In today’s world driven by digital transformation where the boundaries between sales, service and marketing are finally coming together in the service of the customer, understanding the emotional connections between companies, products and human beings is foundational to marketing, communication and business today. 
     
    This is where brand engagement lives and even though innovation and technology are moving a blistering pace, customer centricity in the context of one-to-one relationships is essential if brands are to survive moving forward. 
     
    What this means is it’s not just differentiation, but how a customer (or prospect) feels that also matters. 
     
    HubSpot came together with Amanda Slavin to create a course they call “Measuring Brand Engagement and Emotional Connection.” Her seven steps of engagement are brilliant and a practical roadmap every marketer and company needs to understand, internalize and apply. 
     
    This is why I have adopted this course into my courses now so that students will be empowered to help companies create even greater value in the future than they would without this framework.
    Read more professor stories on our community page here

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